Writing is a glamorous occupation – at least from the outside. Popular depictions of our profession tend to leave out all the other stuff that comes with the territory: carpal tunnel syndrome, liver failure, penury, and madness.

Okay, okay, I jest. I love being a writer. Sharing stories with the world and getting paid for it is bloody brilliant. It’s a dream job, and like any profession with a horde of neophytes seeking to break in, there are plenty of sharks waiting to chew them to bits.

Publishing is a screwed up business. The often labyrinthine path to success makes it much easier for those with nefarious intentions to scam the unsuspecting. But it doesn’t help that so many organizations who claim to help writers, to respect them, to assist them along the path to publication are actually screwing them over.

Before the digital revolution made self-publishing viable on a wide scale, the dividing lines were easier to spot. Traditional publishers paid you if they wanted to buy the rights to your novel. Self-publishers were people who filled their garages with books and tried to hawk them at events. And vanity presses were the scammers, luring the unsuspecting with false promises and roundly condemned by self-publishers and traditional publishers alike.

Today it’s very different. The scammy vanity presses are owned by traditional publishers who are marketing them as the “easy” way to self-publish – when it’s nothing more than a horrifically expensive and terribly ineffective way to publish your work, guaranteed to kill your book’s chance of success stone dead, while emptying your bank account in the process.

Some of you might think: hey, it’s just business. Caveat emptor and all that. And don’t these people know how to use Google?

That’s easy to say from our position of experience. Do you remember how naive you were at the start? Do you remember just how badly you wanted to get published? Do you remember the crushing grind of the query-go-round?

I’m not surprised people get scammed. When you want something so badly, and you can’t seem to make progress towards that goal – no matter how hard you work – you start to go crazy. You get desperate.

And it’s much harder to tell the scammers from the legitimate organizations when they are owned by the same people.

Take Penguin-owned Author Solutions, one of the worst vanity presses out there. Here’s how they hoodwink inexperienced writers into using their horribly expensive service.

If you Google a term like “find a publisher” the results are littered with sites like FindYourPublisher.com (which I’m not going to link to because that will help their SEO, but you can cut-and-paste that address).

The website purports to be an independent resource, helping to pair you with the most suitable publishing company. Or as they put it:

dedicated to helping both first-time and experienced authors identify the most suitable indie book publishing company for their book. With the information you provide about your book and goals, FYP makes a recommendation as to which indie book publisher has the best publishing package to help you reach your publishing objectives.

Below this message is an online questionnaire asking you about your book. When you have completed that and handed over your phone number, the site makes a recommendation based on your answers.

Except the only companies recommended are Trafford, AuthorHouse, Xlibris, and iUniverse – all of which are scammy vanity presses, all owned by Author Solutions. And, fitting with the rest of the pattern, FindYourPublisher.com is just one of many (many!) such sites owned and operated by Author Solutions, purporting to make independent recommendations, but only recommending Author Solutions companies.

I have sympathy for those hoodwinked by awful companies like Author Solutions. The dividing lines aren’t as obvious. And inexperienced writers stupidly assume that a company like Penguin has their best interests at heart. Maybe it’s the cuddly logo.

It’s now almost a year since Penguin bought the company (instead of buying, say, Goodreads, but I digress). It should be clear to everyone now that Penguin has no intention of changing Author Solutions’ scammy approach. In fact, Penguin just announced plans to take the scam global.

Penguin has been looking under the Author Solutions hood for 10 months now. Its conclusion was this: we can make this bigger. We can take this scam on the road and start exploiting writers all over the planet.

More disturbingly, my comment pointing this appears to have been scrubbed from The Bookseller, is stuck in the moderation queue on Digital Book World’s piece (despiteexplicitly stating that they had posted it).

The reaction at the London Book Fair was similar. No-one from traditional publishing wanted to talk about Penguin’s ownership of Author Solutions. No-one wants to talk about how a supposedly legitimate publisher now owns the most successful author scamming organization on the planet.

These guys are probably taking their cue from the New York Times, who won’t mention anything remotely critical about Author Solutions, but are happy to spend lots of time showing them in a positive light (like here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

Writer Beware

The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) has done sterling work over the years warning writers away from people like Author Solutions both on their own site, and through their industry watchdog Writer Beware.

However, I would love to see them go one step further.

Remember those awful Random House digital-first imprints? Public pressure forced Random House to change the horribly one-sided terms it was offering writers. That result was achieved after Writer Beware blogged about it, SFWA president John Scalzi followed up, and SFWA itself threatened to de-list Random House as a qualifying market.

What Author Solutions is doing to writers is far, far worse.

Isn’t it time to do something about this? Isn’t it time to threaten to de-list Penguin as a qualifying market if they don’t clean up Author Solutions?

Hands Up If You Don’t Own A Vanity Press

There’s only problem with this approach. Where do you stop? Because you would have to threaten to do the same with all these guys too:

1. Simon & Schuster hired Author Solutions to run their own scammy vanity press – Archway Publishing. If that wasn’t enough, they then offered a bounty to bloggers to lie about the company.

If it was down to me, I would threaten to de-list all these guys until they cleaned house, but Penguin would be a good start, given they (a) it all comes back to Author Solutions, (b) Penguin own Author Solutions, (c) Penguin have shown no interest in addressing concerns, and (d) Penguin is planning a massive expansion of the Author Solutions scam.

Writers Digest & Lulu

I’m sure Digital Book World’s reluctance to mention the problems with Author Solutions has nothing to do with the fact that they are owned by F+W Media, which also owns yet another crappy vanity press – Abbot Press (which has some of the worst prices out there).

In a refreshing change of pace, this crappy vanity press is not actually powered by Author Solutions. Abbot Press is a division of Writers Digest. Yes, that Writers Digest.

If that catches you by surprise, I’m sorry to say that Writers Digest went over to the dark side a few years back, and now spam their subscribers with crap like this.

I’m sure Author Solutions was disappointed to miss out on that deal but at least they can console themselves with the new partnership they struck with Lulu last month to provide premium (i.e. overpriced and ineffective) marketing services to Lulu customers.

Penguin think they can continue to ride out the storm, ignoring the criticism and collecting their ill-gotten gains, but if we make enough noise, they will have to respond. That starts with sharing this post, or, even better, blogging about it yourself.

But it also means reaching out to inexperienced writers and trying to steer them away from these crooks. We need to get the message out that self-publishing is not the impossible task it’s painted as. Sarah Woodbury has a helpful post on the basics here, and I have another here. Feel free to point newbies to them, or write your own.

Each time you see an article talking about Author Solutions and not mentioning all the issues, comment underneath and call them on it. Even if the media don’t change their one-eyed approach, readers will see the comments.

If you’re a member of a writers organization like SFWA, RWA, or MWA, ask what they are doing about Penguin. Ask them why they haven’t threatened to de-list Penguin. And keep pressing them! The SFWA (and the RWA) were really strong in response to Random House. We need the same from them again.

150,000 writers have been screwed over already. I think that’s enough. Don’t you?

I just saw this the other day–it was the first time I’d heard of Author Solutions, but now it makes even more sense when combined with your post here. A group of authors are suing Author Solutions and Penguin for, among other things, *deliberately* introducing errors into their manuscripts and then charging them to clean up the e-copies… https://www.courthousenews.com/2013/04/30/57157.htm

Thank you very much for this helpful and informative post. Although biased, it sounds like there is reason for it. Either way, we can make our own conclusions, and we have the evidence to follow if we are diligent enough to do our footwork. Thanks again!

Great post. You’re right about how easy it is for “newbies” to get sucked in–even when they’re otherwise well educated people. It’s like they see the phrase “we’ll publish your book!” and don’t read any further or stop to consider their options.

The thing is, self-publishing is easy these days. While the first time you do it is scary, you quickly realize how much fun it is to control all aspects of your work. Writers don’t need to spend a fortune to get this so-called help the vanity presses offer. They can hire their own editor and cover artist for a reasonable price.

I encourage all authors considering self-publishing to do it themselves. There are places online that will help, and they don’t charge you. 🙂 Hell, contact me. I’ll talk you through it.

As a SFWA member, I read all the time how members are talking about the worsening environment for writers, especially economically. That said, the organizations are relatively powerless unless established, moneymaking authors step up and punish the offending companies by walking away. That seldom happens. But they can help get the word out.

The best thing is for writers who’ve been around the block to continue putting the word out also and informing new and just starting writers about unfair business practices. They really need to know this information! I take newbies underwing whenever I see one and direct them to resources, hoping to save them from making terrible, career-damaging mistakes. For every wonderful, author friendly publisher out there, you can find others that are mercenary or, just as bad, financially unsound. The best offense in a writer’s case is a good defense. Knowledge is the best weapon.

I’m a genre writer, and I self-publish and work with publishers I trust. It is difficult to know who the skanky opportunists are these days. The more everyone talks about them, the better off authors will be.

What a great post, Theo. I just love self-publishing because I have control over absolutely everything. I’ve been published by Harper Collins (before they went to the dark side and when they paid ME), but I now publish through LULU and am re-thinking this decision. For some reason my ‘cut’ of the book profits has been cut severely in the past two months and I haven’t been able to figure out why. If I find out I’ll let the world know…